One afternoon, I was in the library of a small town in Mississippi, in need of some information, so I went up to the lady behind the desk there. Ahead of me were an elderly white man and a young black woman. The elderly man was saying, “Just hit me suddenly, you know, that I wanted somethin’, and then … then it hit me what it was. That I wanted. It was pie.”
“Well,” said the lady behind the desk.
“A piece a pie. It’s funny ’cause uuu-sually I don’t want pie, this time a day. But I did, that’s exactly what it was, that I wanted. A piece a pie. But I couldn’t think who would have pie … this time a day.”
“Uh-hmmmm,” said the librarian.
“Miz Boyd a course serves extremely fine pie. But a course Miz Boyd wouldn’t be open…”
“I was going to say,” said the librarian.
“… this time a day. So I said to myself, I said, ‘Now, Wawltuh, where in town would they be liable to know … where a body could get a piece a pie.”
“Mm-hm,” said the librarian, looking thoughtful. “This time a day.”
“I said, ‘Well, I tell you where somebody is liable to know. At the li-berrry.’ So I told myself that what I would do would be to just come on over here and…”
“I declare, Mr. Owsley…”
The librarian raised her voice: “IOTA?”
A faint voice replied from back in the stacks: “Uh-huuuuuuuh?”
“DO YOU KNOW WHERE MR. OWSLEY COULD GET A PIECE A PIE?”
“You mean … this time a day?”
At that point, the young black woman stepped forward and said, “’Scuse me, but do you have anything about the army? ’Cause I got to get out of this damn town.”
As a young man, Daniel Schorr invented the ice cream scoop as we know it today. Schorr spent most of 1934 hitchhiking west. In Cedar Falls, Iowa, he found work as a soda jerk at the drugstore of one Ewell Larkin. Thinking there must be some neater way of dipping ice cream, Schorr experimented in Larkin’s workshop behind the store and came up with the little wiry deal that slides along the cup of the scoop to tump out the ball of ice cream when you press something with your thumb. Then he moved on westerly to another town. A reporter for The Des Moines Register heard this story and assumed it was an urban legend. But last week the Register reported that it checked out. An item in the Cedar Falls Sentinel actually credited young Daniel with the invention. And the patent for it is registered in the name of Ewell Larkin. “I suppose I should be a rich man,” responded Schorr, “but then I would not have done the other things that I have done.”
Homemade ice cream is utterly different,
Far more reviverant,
From that which you buy in the stores.
Homemade ice cream is something you eat enough of to feel for two days in your pores.
The peaches in homemade ice cream taste and chew like peaches,
For that is what they are.
And as for the milk and the sugar and egg whites, each is
Something Mama brought home from the grocery herself in the car.
And Daddy goes out and brings home some ice
And salts it down in the churn,
And each kid once or twice
Takes a turn at turning the churn,
Occasionally peeking in to learn
Whether the stuff is beginning to form,
Because the evening is certainly warm …
You can’t have any till after the chicken.
But considering the chicken, who’s kicken?
The parents they may wrangle,
The kiddies they may roam,
But sitting round with their dishes of homemade,
They all make it home.
The Lincoln, Nebraska, resident Andrew Hedridge’s cat, Hattie, eats ice cream, as you can see on six different YouTube videos posted by Hedridge in the last three weeks. Not one of these videos has been clicked on by more than a handful of people. “Why don’t they go viral?” demands Hedridge. “When did you ever see a cat eat ice cream so pretty! ‘Myow,’ she says afterward, and, again, ‘myow.’ I think she can tell nobody is clicking on her videos. But people say, ‘Who doesn’t eat ice cream? And anyway,’ they say, ‘ice cream isn’t good for cats.’ I say, tell that to Hattie.”
Peaches reach us
Where we live.
Peaches teach us
To forgive
Impeachment, leeches,
Negative
Reactions, breaches,
And each es-
Cargot we have had to eat.
A peach is such a blessed thing,
However hard it tries to cling
To the pit, we cannot let it be.
It’s up to us to set it free.
One summer years ago in Massachusetts, a heartily humorous friend of mine was over for lunch. I brought out dessert. She looked as if it were a slap in the face. Watermelon?
I was startled. Even, for a moment, dumbfounded. To be startled is a relatively unscathing gateway to learning, but I resist being found dumb. This wasn’t a stereotype thing; it was actual, present, literal watermelon. Surely she knew I wouldn’t serve her watermelon—or not serve her watermelon—because she was black. At her house, I had relished her fried chicken, her greens, her white beans simmered forever with ham hock. And I don’t say this boastfully, but with other black people I had eaten chitlins.
Don’t let me hear you all belittlin’
That ultra-down-home food, the chitlin.
You may find it infra dig,
But it worked wonders for the pig.
Watermelon, though. The moment passed, we were still friends, but she declined watermelon. I had some, but without enthusiasm, which is no way to eat watermelon. We joked freely about racial stuff, but we never talked about that.
Watermelon deserves respect. It’s the closest thing in the fruit line to a pregnant belly, the most gratifying object in or out of nature to thump except a drum. Its deep red texture is almost confectionary, and yet what could be more natural? What other toothsomeness is like watermelon’s melty-crisp midway between apple bite and slurp of sorbet? Do you regard it as a too-obvious, guzzly fruit, something people push their faces into and go blblblub, with nothing in it but sugar and water? According to the latest research, watermelon is extremely high in newly discovered nutrients, including lycopene, which is important for both heart and bone health, and citrulline, which the body converts into another amino acid that improves blood flow and “may prevent excess accumulation of fat in fat cells due to blocked activity of an enzyme called tissue-nonspecific alkaline phosphatase, or TNAP.”
I am not quoting from the National Watermelon Council, if there is one; I am quoting one of the many independent health-conscious Web sites trumpeting the news that watermelon may combat cancer, Alzheimer’s, and erectile dysfunction. And yes, it’s sweet, but it’s 92 percent water, so a cup of it is less of a glycemic load than an apple is. And water is good for us.
Furthermore, according to NationalGeographic.com, “Watermelon juice may be next ‘green’ fuel.” Twenty percent of watermelons “have odd shapes or scarred rinds that turn off consumers,” so twenty tons of watermelon may be left to rot every year in a single watermelon field. While agricultural researchers were experimenting with ugly-melon juice, extracting antioxidants from it, they got the notion that the juice could also yield biofuel. Watermelon farmers could at least produce enough home-brew ethanol to run their tractors.
What if Western culture treated the word “watermelon” with the same respect as “stone”?
Like a rolling watermelon, the Rosetta watermelon, leave no watermelon unturned, watermelon walls do not a prison make, if you live in a glass house don’t throw watermelons, John Ruskin’s Watermelons of Venice, heart made of watermelon doody-wa doody-wa, the Watermelon Age, the Great Watermelon Face. Emma Watermelon. Oliver Watermelon. Everybody must get watermeloned.
James Dickey put out a collection of poems called Into the Stone. Let’s move on to Into the Watermelon. On the cover, a sword (as in The Sword in the Watermelon) stuck into Watermelon Mountain, which has Melonwall Jackson carved into it on horseback. Poets think they are so hard and cool, getting down to stone. What’s wrong with wet and sweet:
Psalms
He shall give his angels charge over thee, to keep thee in all thy ways,
They shall bear thee up in their hands, lest thou dash thy foot against a watermelon.
Edward FitzGerald
Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night
Has flung the Watermelon that puts the Stars to Flight.
Richard Wilbur
How should we dream of this place without us?—
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A watermelon look on the watermelon’s face?
John Keats
Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star,
Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a watermelon.
T. S. Eliot
Clear the air! clean the sky! wash the wind! take the watermelon from the watermelon, and wash them.
Theodore Roethke
Fear was my father, Father Fear.
His look drained the watermelons.
What other prize is associated not only with yearning but with traditionally blameless larceny?
It don’t take a felon
To steal watermelon.
Ain’t misdemeaning,
Just intervening
Between the rind
And what anybody’s entitled to find
Inside.
I tell you, I’d
Rather hear a fat watermelon go “R-r-roach”
Than walk up to Susie with a diamond broach.
All you need’s
A place to put the seeds.
I know a lady who, as a teenager, stole the prizewinning watermelon from the Neshoba, Mississippi, County Fair by carting it out in a baby carriage. Then, too, that lady is white.
One of Frederick Douglass’s most notable speeches, writes William S. McFeely in his biography of the great black orator, “all came down to watermelons.” It was in 1893 at the Chicago World’s Fair. Douglass had been presiding over the Haitian exhibition, the only one under African-American control. Over at the food pavilion, the actress Nancy Green, like Douglass an ex-slave, was a big hit playing Aunt Jemima—fairgoers were sporting buttons featuring her catchphrase, “I’s in town, Honey.” Another exhibit presented natives of Dahomey, clad (some days shivering) in native attire and doing native things. The joyful singing of the Dahomeyan women was presumed to reflect the pleasure they must feel to be in America surrounded by technological wonders, but when the songs were translated, according to John Strausbaugh in Black Like You: Blackface, Whiteface, Insult, and Imitation in American Popular Culture, the lyrics were “more along the lines of, ‘We have come from a far country to a land where all men are White. If you will come to our country we will take pleasure in cutting your White throats.’”
To similarly honor Douglass, and black Americans in general, the fair’s organizers had declared an occasion: “Colored People’s Day,” with Douglass as the featured speaker and—hey-hey, all you colored people—free watermelon.
By this time, Douglass, seventy-five, was more “antique abolitionist,” as McFeely puts it, than the bold young fugitive from bondage who, in the words of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “stood … like an African prince,… grand in his physical proportions, majestic in his wrath, as with wit, satire, and indignation he graphically described the bitterness of slavery.” Once, when an audience hissed him, he had responded, “I am glad to hear these hisses. It was said by a very learned man that when the cool voice of truth falls into the burning vortex of falsehood there would always be hissing.” Often in the course of an antislavery speech, he would move audiences to outbursts of laughter by taking on the voice of a white preacher explaining to enslaved people why they should be gratefully obedient.
Now, half a century later, slavery was officially gone. But in 1892 Americans had set an all-time annual record, which still stands, of 230 lynchings,1 161 of the victims being African-American. Thirty-year-old Ida B. Wells had launched an international antilynching campaign, after three of her friends in Memphis had been dragged out of jail and shot to death for defending their grocery store against people trying to drive them out of business. Wells and other up-to-date black leaders feared Colored People’s Day would be a joke and Douglass the butt of it. They boycotted the occasion and urged Douglass to withdraw. Wells wrote that the fair’s “horticultural department has already pledged itself to put plenty of watermelons around on the grounds with permission to the brother in black to ‘appropriate’ them … The sight of the horde that would be attracted there by the dazzling prospect of plenty of free watermelons to eat, will give our enemies all the illustration they wish as an excuse for not treating the Afro-American with the equality of other citizens.”
Puck, the mainstream humor magazine of the day, ran a two-page cartoon by Frederick Opper, recognized today as a major comic artist, illustrating a poem titled “Darkies’ Day at the Fair.” Spear-carrying Africans in fancied native garb and sharply dressed black Americans with drums and tubas are shown marching together in a long procession, all of them looking big-lippedly identical except for their clothes. Then they catch sight of a watermelon stand (“The Darky’s theme and dream”) set up by “a Georgia coon, named Major Moon,” who means to ruin the parade, “because to lead the whole affair / He had not had his way.” Sure enough, all the “United Sons of Ham” swerve off to “gaily loot the luscious fruit / And lie down in the shade.”
Douglass was determined to speak anyway. He began to read solemnly (as his mostly black audience was being handed leaflets titled “No Watermelon”) from a paper he had prepared, “The Race Problem in America.” In the crowd, young white men hooted and jeered.
Consider that at this age Douglass no longer looked like an African prince but like Jim Brown and Morgan Freeman rolled together, with a great white crop of beard and hair. Why would young white men feel free to mock him? Maybe they were readers of Puck—the Saturday Night Live or The Daily Show of its time. (Puck was published in New York City. In 1900, Puck’s cover cartoon showed men with guns and rope passing an African-American family’s house. A young black man points to them, puzzled, as an older one hustles a toddler away and a black woman holding a baby looks afraid. “Ain’ this much bettah dan in de slav’ry days, Uncle Tom?” asks the young man. And old uncle answers, “I dunno, rightly. In dem times we was too valy’ble to be lynched!” This was titled, “In Georgia.” In 1892, a black man was lynched in Port Jervis, New York.)
Douglass’s great voice faltered. More jeering. He threw down the paper. He took off his glasses. His eyes flashed, his voice rebounded, and he held forth from the heart for over an hour. “Men talk of the Negro problem,” he said. “There is no Negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own Constitution.” Thunderous applause. To listen to politicians today, you’d think “the American people” are the last word in everything. Douglass was saying, Come on, American people, show me something.
A great moment, as even Wells conceded. But why did Frederick Douglass have to be framed by, and at odds with, watermelon? You know he liked watermelon, within reason. Everybody likes watermelon unless something spoils watermelon for them.
One of the earliest American motion pictures, The Watermelon Patch, shows black people who have stolen watermelons being tracked by white farmers with bloodhounds to a cabin where they’re dancing the buck and wing and enjoying the melons “as only Southern ‘coons’ can.” The farmers nail the doors and windows shut and seal off the chimney. When the merrymakers finally bust out through a window, each one is given “a kick or clout over the head to vary the monotony.” But if that would put you off watermelon, then how about The Chicken Thief (1904), summarized by its distributor, Biograph, as follows: “From the opening of the picture, where the coon with the grinning face is seen devouring fried chicken, to the end where he hangs down from the ceiling, caught by a bear trap on his leg, the film is one continuous shout of laughter.” Are you going to blame the chicken?
You know at least some of Douglass’s listeners, rapt as they were by what had been described as “the magnetism and music of his wonderfully elastic voice,” were also thinking, Some of that watermelon would go good right now. Where is the justice in people’s being deprived of watermelon (not to mention: the watermelons of today are descendants of seeds brought from Africa) because others mock their appreciation of it? If anybody should be deprived of watermelon, it’s the mockers.
How about those jackanapeses around the country who have made news by erecting effigies of President Obama with watermelon? In one case, the effigy consisted of just two watermelons in an empty chair—an apparently approving reference to the bizarre performance by Clint Eastwood, addressing an empty chair as if it were Obama, at the Republican National Convention. Why doesn’t God turn the taste of watermelon to gall in those jackanapeses’ mouths? And by the way, why did it have to be Morgan Freeman tortured to death in Unforgiven? I know, Clint avenged him, by shooting up the joint. How come it’s never the black guy avenging a white guy who was tortured to death?
If you visit the city of Lincoln, Illinois, you will see that it honors Abraham Lincoln with a painted steel sculpture of a life-sized lengthwise slice of watermelon. Lincoln had done legal work for the founders, and though this was 1853 and Abe was just an ex-congressman, they named the town for him. According to local legend, he took it upon himself to give his namesake a christening—went to the market, bought two watermelons, carried one under each arm to the center of town, busted one open, and cast some of its juice upon the ground. Do you think Lincoln and whoever else was on hand threw away that melon, or the other one? They were white. They could relate to watermelon freely.
No watermelon was involved, but good humor was, when Frederick Douglass visited the White House for the first time in 1863. Douglass was an outspoken critic of what he saw as Lincoln’s dilatory approach toward emancipation (an approach that eventually proved to be roundabout). The president, he had written, “seems to have an ever increasing passion for making himself appear silly and ridiculous.” Invited, Douglass found Abe seated in a low chair and immersed in books and papers. “At my approach,” Douglass would recall, “he slowly drew his feet in from the different parts of the room into which they had strayed, and he began to rise, and continued to rise, until he looked down upon me, and extended his hand and gave me a welcome.”
If that had been written from a white person’s point of view, it would smack of paternalism—the looking-down-upon part. But Lincoln couldn’t help being tall (not that he didn’t use it), any more than watermelon can help being sweet. What if Abe had served Douglass some? Maybe someday all God’s children can generate righteous cultural juice from watermelon—as from the blues, and the concept jelly roll (would white Americans, acting alone, have come up with the concept jelly roll? Have Europeans come up with it yet?), and basketball above the rim, and every new dancing trend since the buck and wing. And let him who is without sin cast the first whatever. Aspersion.
Watermelon is not cold and hard like stone. Watermelon is like pie—messy, excessive, suggestive of sex. And pie is more interesting than watermelon because it has so many different things going on at once. Ought to be right down Mark Twain’s alley. Huck Finn said there was nothing wrong with the Widow Douglas’s cooking except “everything was cooked by itself. In a barrel of odds and ends … things get mixed up, and the juice kind of swaps around, and the things go better.”
In a notebook in 1897, Twain described a dream he’d had. A woman with “round black face, shiny black eyes, thick lips … about 22, and … not fleshy, not fat, merely rounded and plump; and good-natured and not at all bad-looking. She had but one garment on … She sold me a pie; a mushy apple pie—hot. She was eating one herself with a tin teaspoon. She made a disgusting proposition to me.”
He doesn’t tell us what that proposition was, just that he responded to it “a little jeeringly—and this embarrassed her.” He “made a sarcastic remark.” Embarrassed her, did it? The dream goes on, even more embarrassingly for the reader who is begging Mark’s unconscious to know a good thing when he sees it. But here, in the notebook entry, is how the dream ends: “My stomach rose—there everything vanished.” Stomach rose but not to the occasion.
Remember that Twain is a man who, in A Tramp Abroad, calls a painting by Titian, of Venus reclining nude, “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses … How I should like to describe her—just to see what a holy indignation I could stir up … [T]he world is willing to let its son and its daughter and itself look at Titian’s beast, but won’t stand a description of it in words.”
It’s a beautiful painting, and Venus looks terrific in it. She makes every other Venus you’ve seen look like your aunt Irene. Good head on her shoulders, too, looking right back at us with a level gaze. Let’s say Twain was mocking the world’s hypocrisy. He wasn’t really appalled by the painting, but by the limits on what you could write for the public back then. Still, there’s something more than tongue-in-cheek going on there. Titian’s beast!
Today I am in New Orleans, a city whose quite respectable women’s marching societies—jolly parade dancers promoting sisterhood in corsets of all different sizes—include the Bearded Oysters (known for wearing merkins over their tights while parading), the Pussyfooters, and the Camel Toe Lady Steppers. So I am free to tell you what Twain found so shocking about Titian’s Venus. She has her hand, in a friendly sort of way, on her mound of Venus.
Today we don’t see anything wrong with that. And it’s hard to think of anything wrong with any imaginable combination of pie and a good-natured woman. (Not that any male notion of female good nature is the gold standard, but it ought to be worth something.) Still, in America today the popular expression “hot mess” comes to mind. Mark Twain’s dream was head-slappingly racist, in various analyzable ways, but it’s hot. It might stand in for the American dream: the union of black and white, slave and free, Yankee dry and Southern lush—deflected by guilt, fear, and shame but urged, still, by desire.
If we’re still saving room for pie, we’re not finished yet.
Pie.
Oh my.
Nothing tastes sweet,
Wet, salty, and dry
All at once so well as pie.
Apple and pumpkin and mince and black bottom,
I’ll come to your place every day if you’ve got ’em.
Pie.